How a biz reporter got fired for signing a non-compete clause

Casey Sullivan of Bloomberg BNA interviewed Stephanie Russell-Kraft, a 28-year-old journalist who Thomson Reuters fired within weeks after hiring her in September, learning she had signed a non-compete agreement in 2013 with her former employer, the legal news site Law360.

Here is an excerpt of what Russell-Kraft said:

I applied to a job at Reuters over the summer, and after an initial interview, filled out the online application. On the application there was a question asking me to check a box acknowledging I wasn’t subject to any restrictive covenants that would prohibit me from doing my job at Reuters. I checked it.

After I was offered the business of law gig at Reuters, I left Law360. It’s hard to believe now, but leaving felt really bittersweet. I really loved my colleagues, and my editors even bought me a German chocolate cake to celebrate my last day.

Over a month later, two weeks after I started at Reuters, I received a threatening letter from Law360 telling me I was violating the agreement. I immediately went to my editors at Reuters, who told me they’d work with HR to get it resolved. Two days later, after spending the morning in court waiting for the Dewey verdict, I was packing up my stuff and getting escorted out of the office. I was technically fired for “dishonesty,” because of the box I had checked.

I later found out that Law360 sent a separate letter to Thomson Reuters’ GC saying I had had access to “critical and sensitive confidential and proprietary information” and asking Reuters to take “immediate steps” to make sure I didn’t disclose any of it. I have no idea what confidential information I supposedly had access to, but I understand that from Reuters’ perspective, I was a litigation risk. It was a lot easier to fire me on a technicality than to try to test Law360’s agreement in court. I also later found out that every editor in my section at Reuters had been well aware of the non-compete for years.

Read more here.